Second Response to Glosswatch Blog

This response is in reply to a continuing discussion here: A few key points here. Calvin Klein Boxer Baratos Several inquiries have established that the main factors behind Savita Halappanavar’s death were serious and widespread failures in clinical management, not lack of access to abortion. The coroner’s inquest, the Health Service Executive report, and the Health Information and Quality Authority all came to this conclusion. We have nowhere claimed that Germaine Greer is not prochoice. T Shirt Philipp Plein Homme But she is on the record as expressing reservations about some aspects of the prochoice case. Tendances hommesAdidas Yeezy 750 Femme We don’t see why it should be a problem to draw attention to those reservations as part of the abortion conversation. We’re well aware that there is an ongoing philosophical and legal debate about exactly what personhood means. Believe it or not, many prolife people have reflected quite deeply on these issues, and can draw on long and respectable intellectual traditions to guide them. You refer scornfully to our believing in a “magic moment” when gametes join to form a new individual; it’s not a question of believing in magic. It’s a question of recognising that a developing human being is something very different from an unfertilised ovum or a sperm cell. Slip Calvin Klein OutletAdidas Yeezy Boost 750 Pas Cher It is a genetically unique human individual, a clear point at which a new life can be said to have begun. Prochoice people argue that “real” human life begins elsewhere – which is fine, but throws up certain philosophical problems of its own. What is the measure we use for “real” life? Is it consciousness? Is it the ability to feel pain? Is it a certain level of mental or physiological function? Is it having an advanced level of *self*-consciousness, as claimed by Peter Singer when he suggests that human moral value doesn’t begin until two years of age? If life begins at birth, what is it about birth that is significant? And who gets to decide? Anyone who takes a position on abortion has to pick a point at which they think the right to life begins. T Shirt Fendi Homme In that sense, everyone believes in a “magic moment”. Prochoice people, for instance, attach great significance to “wantedness”, the idea being that the right to life depends to some degree on that abstract thought going on in the mother’s – or the couple’s – mind(s). If we were interrogating this idea, we might wonder how the existence or not of a thought can dictate someone else rights. T Shirt Versace Homme Pas Cher The question is not so much whether we believe in such a moment, but how we decide what that moment is and *why*. It’s good rhetorical knockabout to talk about Vatican conspiracies and misogynist dystopias, but it doesn’t help us have a constructive debate about the value of early human life. Mode Being feminist and prolife produces no “cognitive dissonance” and has nothing to do with “cosying up to religious fundamentalists”, particularly if you are one of the many atheist or feminist prolifers. T Shirt Versace HommeT Shirt Givenchy In these days of routine scan pictures of unborn babies in the womb anyone can see the humanity of the unborn baby; there must be a degree of cognitive dissonance in even the most enthusiastic prochoicer. Adidas Yeezy 350 Homme The difficulty of getting over abortion which many women experience is a powerful illustration that on some level they understand that abortion is not just another procedure.